The big switch
Migrating the last 17 years of Gmail to Proton Mail
I got my Gmail account in around march of 2003. Prior to that, I had a hotmail account that I created in maybe 1997–98?(memory is starting to haze there) while I was in college. When I first got my Gmail account, I was the first Craig Albright to sign up so I got first.last@gmail.com. Yay! I was pretty happy with my Gmail for quite a long time.
The first issue-
I’m not sure what happened but around the same time 2 different Craig Albright’s tried to sign up for Gmail using first.last@gmail.com. One of them tried FirstLast@gmail.com but since google said periods don’t matter, I think they just got partially through with the sign up process or did not realize that it failed? Not sure. The other Craig Albright ended up signing up with Last.First@gmail.com. I know that these are 2 separate Craigs since one seems to have ties to government service in the Virginia area and the other is in Central Michigan(based on erroneous emails and other things I started getting). I tried to be a good to my fellow Craig Albright’s and pass along anything that was received in error.
Then I got worried…
I first started really thinking about my privacy with the Snowden story. I always pretty much knew that Google mined my email for better ad serving, but I didn’t feel like I had much to hide. Then I started reading various stories on Hacker News, Twitter et all about people who lose access to their google account either due to misfiring AI, hack attempts, or bad behavior on the account owners part. I can control one of those factors, so the other two started to eat away at me. This was probably around 2016. It wasn’t a huge worry, and I figured most people wont be affected in this way, so I was probably safe. But it still sorta gnawed at me. As time progressed, I started becoming more privacy conscious and I think I really started to seriously consider migrating most of my personal data off of Google in the last year or two.
But Where???
I wasn’t really sure where I could migrate my data, and switching to say, icloud.com seemed like a better solution, but maybe only slightly. I wanted encrypted email, and I wanted to use my own domain. I also wanted this to be a service that I pay money for, and have a line to real support should something go wrong. I briefly considered rolling my own email, but I know just enough to know I don’t want to debug problems and spend a large amount of time configuring and tweaking my email. So after a bit of research I decided I would try Proton mail.
Signing up for Proton
Getting signed up was pretty painless, I chose the ‘Plus’ plan that allowed a custom domain name, and upgraded the storage to 10gb, since my gmail box was around 7gb. Next step was to log into my domain manager and set up dkim and mx records. The process was well documented by proton mail so getting things setup and propagated took around 3 hours start to finish.(20 or so minutes was the actual changes, the rest was replication…).
Sweet, I got proton mail, let me just plug it into my iOS mail settings…
Oh wait, you cant do that. iOS’s mail app does not currently support encrypted mail per the following FAQ-
Ok so I have to use the proton mail app. I think this is probably the first part of the experience that isn’t as good as it could be. The mail app itself is fine, not quite as polished as the iOS mail app, but completely serviceable. My main complaints? Currently there is no dark mode in the non beta versions of mail for the browser and no dark mode option for iOS. It isn’t a deal breaker, but would like to see more customization in future versions.
The Great Migration…
Proton mail helpfully provides a migration assistant that will let you transfer your email from any email provider that supports imap and has a way around 2 factor authentication. With Gmail, I had to create an app specific password that I feed into the migration tool to do the transfer. The migration itself took about 46 hours from start to finish, and each and every mail was tagged with gmail.com mm/dd/yyyy. This was very helpful when doing after the fact cleanup. While I was at it, I migrated my live.com email into this mailbox as well. This was a much smaller account that mainly use to manage my various Microsoft accounts. It too was tagged live.com mm/dd/yyyy and took about 30 minutes. The one issue I had with this migration was Microsoft blocked the log in attempt as it was flagged as unusual since it originated in Switzerland. I had to log into the security control panel of my live.com account to authorize the login, at which point it worked seamlessly.
Whats next?
I have set up a mail forward on my Gmail account and I have started the process of going through all of my various online accounts and changing the email address. This was also a good chance to do a security checkup of all of these accounts and set up fresh passwords. I’m only about 10% done with this part of the process, but thanks to Covid and the nature of being a contractor I’ve got time…
Final Thoughts
I’m glad I did this for a few reasons:
- I got to put my domain name to use again
- I feel like I will have recourse should something happen with my account, which is my main concern with using Google as my mail provider. Privacy is also a concern, but less of one. There is just too much of the past 17 years of my life tied up in a free service, and I didn’t like that.
- I was able to shore up security for all of my online accounts, which this day in age is something you should do early and often.
Do you hate Google?
No, not at all. I do have a few concerns which I listed above, but I will continue to use some Google services, but in a diminished capacity. No one company should have such a complete picture into my life, habits and personal business. Its not just Google, I will be looking into all of my online accounts to see where I can take back a bit of privacy. If anything interesting comes of it, I will post it here. Also, to anyone wondering. I am posting my experience and this is not any sort of advertisement or shilling for Protonmail.